This week's Xbox Live Arcade offerings are brought to you by the letter B! Something old and something we hope you'll really like are coming your way, in the form of the arcade classic Battlezone (400 Microsoft points) and Rocky & Bullwinkle (800 Microsoft points). One is a fast-paced collection of microgames featuring classic cartoon characters from ages past, and the other is vector tank combat with redone graphics and all-new Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag modes! Both utilize the Xbox Live Vision Camera for added functionality, so now it's up to you to figure out which is which. Good luck and godspeed!

This week on Arcade: Bullwinkle and Battlezone [Xbox Live's Major Nelson]

The Evolution of the Team Multiplayer FPS

Serious games are an increasingly prevalent, albeit not necessarily increasingly popular, type of videogame. One of the most prominent players in serious games has long been the military, with their significant investments in training games of their own, as well as advertising and cross-over games like America's Army and Full Spectrum Warrior.

They've been at it a lot longer than you think. Way back in 1981, the US Army commissioned Atari to create a modified version of the hit arcade game Battlezone, to be used to train soldiers to maneuver and target the Bradley "armored fighting vehicle" (that's a "tank" to the rest of us).

I knew about the game thanks to an article Peter Smith wrote for a collection I co-edited. I unearthed the image above during some research for the Atari VCS book Nick Montfort and I are finishing. It's from the official Atari fan club magazine.

E306: BattleZone Screens

Atari's E3

Polygons Meet Pebbles